The House Next Door

Re: the Democratic Presidential Debate, here is a take on last night's debate that seems to represent a lot of people's opinion on what a farce it was.

I didn't know lapel pins or crazy reverends became more important than a war, the economy and health care. This is the same shoddy news journalism consisting of media-generated controversies that was displayed in the last two presidential election cycles. Look at what those resulted in.

Why was Stephanapoulos even a moderator? Conflict of interest anyone? And why isn't the media questioning Hillary Clinton's patriotism as much as they do Obama? She isn't wearing a lapel pin either. Or do we assume all white people are, by default, patriotic? Unless they spoke out against the war.

Weirdly, I've been working on an Obama/Coen brothers riff in my head for a few days now. It might be the time to post it!

Walter Chaw is truly an awful critic, a weak writer, and maybe a bad person to boot. His comparison of No Country to Milton demonstrates that even as he appeals to authority, he doesn't understand where it derives from (Milton has been read for several hundred years; No Country came out less than 12 months ago---it's almost impossible to judge a work's captial-G greatness fewer than ten years out).

I'm posting here, rather than on his site, because I think this piece points to a much larger problem in film writing, one nearly as serious as the loss of critics in newspapers: Armond's Syndrome (named for its most famous victim/carrier/transmission vector). A.S. is what occurs when a reasonably bright guy concludes that the best way to achieve fame and fortune is through absolutism, bad manners, flashy display of movie trivia coupled with ignorance about the larger history of the liberal arts, and lots and lots of bile.

In part, I blame the blogosphere---as someone rightly noted, posting, "________ has a number of interesting moments, including some striking parallels to the Decameron, but doesn't quite come together" will get you ignored; posting "________ resembles some half-evolved creature crawling from primordial shit with feces clinging to its milky eyelids as it tries to stumble on rickety legs. It's makers should be killed" will get you thousands of hits. And sadly, this approval mechanism works with cultural gatekeepers as well---Chaw and White get plenty of attention from Matt's site, and praised as "interesting", "provocative" and "intense" even though they rarely say anything interesting, provoke needlessly, and are intense like a self-cutting teenager.

The problem comes down to what was noted in Ratatouille: bad criticism---and invective---is more fun to write and more fun to read than good criticism (though Chaw, like White, gets around that by turning even positive reviews into spittle-flecked tirades against anyone who doesn't love his favorite things quite enough, or in quite the right way). But it's still a cheap attention-grabber, and does a lot to raise the temperature and lower the quality of the discourse. Moreover, despite Chaw's assertions to the contrary, invective really has no taste---you can rant about the greatness of No Country, or about the crapiness of No Country, or whatever---it's a form of writing that conceals quality of thought rather than clarifying it. It would be nice if there were some collective decision to look away from these guys like we would a street-corner ranter, a Paris Hilton sex tape, or a car accident, but of course, we don't look away from any of those things, do we?

Sigh. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a creep shouting at a human ear---forever.

P.S.: No Country was a pretty good movie, but way more obvious, leaden, and poorly thought-through than other, smarter Coen movies.

Re: the Chen post-

"The irony of it is that you make any kind of consideration a matter of 'well, everyone’s entitled to their opinion' and suddenly nobody needs yours."

I see...so it's crucial that we don't allow criticism to become "debased" because it might threaten our own sense of self-importance...? This seems dangerously close to the "we gotta stop all this moral-relativism talk, else folks might stop goin' to church and such!" school of thought, where it's not the potential validity of the world-view that matters, but the extent to which it threatens our dearly-held values and/or sense of place in the world.

In short, dude needs to get over himself. No one's "knowledge" can browbeat people into liking something they don't like (or vice versa) unless said people are so intellectually insecure they bow to any whiff of "authority."

You can prove a lot of things, but you can't prove "good." Good luck trying.

To That Fuzzy Bastard - boy, you said it. When I first discovered Armond White's writing I was fascinated by the fact that he seemed so contrarian. His opinions seemed to fly in the face of everyone else's and his full-on ranting mode of writing was something I found highly entertaining. After following his column for a few months, though, I found it wearying and predictable. Now I can hardly even bear to look at it. I was luckier with Mr. Chaw as I never went through that silly infatuation stage him with - I found him pretentious and boorish with the first review of his I read.

Anyways, this is what I posted on his site (is cross-posting bad form? - if so appy polly loggies)...

So, Mr. Chaw, you don't understand, don't really like and certainly don't respect Jonathan Rosenbaum, eh? Well, while I don't always like the same things Mr. Rosenbaum likes, I respect him immensely as a writer and I certainly don't respect anyone who doesn't respect him.

One of the reasons why I do respect Mr. Rosenbaum is because he has the balls to write a negative review of a movie (NCFOM) that everyone else went apeshit over and he does it through writing that is intelligent, graceful and truly thought-provoking (as opposed to cheaply provocative).

You, on the other hand, take a movie that recently won a handful of Oscars and landed top spot on most critics' best-of-year lists and obnoxiously proclaim that anyone who doesn't fall in line is a worthless scumbag. Not exactly a bold move, if you ask me.

What bothers me about your piece is what bothers me about canons - that your aim seems to to stifle debate when it should be to encourage it. The job of a critic should be to challenge preconceived notions, not reinforce them. What you're advocating for is a kind of groupthink where everyone has to agree that Citizen Kane is a masterpiece and those who don't (like Ray Pride or Jorge Luis Borges) are excluded from the party. But why would anyone want to go to a party full of boorish blowhards?

-Rob

Sorry - Chaw, not Chen. Got him confused with someone else...

Re #1: What's especially funny about Chaw's argument is that a lot of my favorite pieces of film criticism are those that logically, meticulously tear down a conventional wisdom. Even decades after the fact, when the daring opinions being expressed have become the new accepted truths, there's still that marvelously weightless sense of reorientation, of the world having swung around you on a pivot, when Agee sticks up for Rhapsody Rabbit or Farber for Fuller, when Rohmer finds quite a bit to intellectually chew on in Hitchcock or Kael struggles to stay awake watching Lean.

Even when I don't agree entirely I'm grateful for the perspective. A Film Comment article from several years ago (can't remember the author, sorry) put forth the still-heretical notion that it was Renoir who learned from and leaned on his purported assistant Becker more than vice versa; I'm not convinced, but since reading that I've appreciated the unity in Becker more, and have somewhat tempered my love for Renoir.

It is the argument that matters, not the conclusion (i.e., whether a film is good or bad). To sort-of defend That Fuzzy Bastard's cited eponym, Armond White's takedown of 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, a film I agree is overrated, reads to me as a sloppy, hateful screed; whereas his argument against perhaps my favorite film of the last few years, Inland Empire, is striking, ingenious, and revelatory, provocative enough to force me to reconsider aspects not only of the film, but my own reasons for loving it.

One of the great things about art is precisely that it's not objective; the pleasures it offers are, for me, secondary to having my take on it bounce off and jostle up against the contrary opinions of others.

Re #3: Speaking of conventional wisdoms, anyone else think that the narrative on the two Democratic candidates is precisely backwards? That Obama is an overrated speaker--long-winded, mostly platitudes--and an excellent policy wonk who knows how to run his political machine, whereas Clinton does a bang-up job connecting with her audiences but can't seem to organize a press conference without a hitch, let alone a campaign?

Not that any of that is as relevant as sartorial accessories, of course. Brian, for example, has 37 pieces of flair. And a terrific smile.

I love the idea of somebody putting forth such a violent defense of the liberal arts. It's usually accepted that people who study the liberal arts in college are those who have no ideas of their own and don't know what they want to do. ("Ooh, yes, I want to study metaphysics! It's so important to be able to intellectually justify things that don't exist and can't happen!")

I once e-mailed Chaw to explain that he'd misinterpreted the ending to a particular film -- in fact he'd gotten it totally wrong -- and without offering any defense of his position or thanking me for the correction, he replied in an incredibly glib and dismissive manner.

Walter: have fun with your liberal arts. Meanwhile, I'll be busy actually creating art.

Just a note that the blogosphere "Film of the Month" club that I attribute to Girish was first proposed (as Girish notes on his site) by Chris Cagle who writes at the blog Category D.

A reader alerted me to this, and I wanted to give credit where it's due.

It's usually accepted that people who study the liberal arts in college are those who have no ideas of their own and don't know what they want to do.

You mean college students?

Re: Image of the Day's Caption

Uhlich - I love you with the heat of a thousand nuns.

I've always had a habit for nuns, Ali. :-)